In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Old Bottle Of Vinegar, or, Into The Black

SBMS160

Obscured Blade was old. Gibblets has said that the first time he met the warlock upon the latest of that goblin's periodic returns to the Company, he had been old and crotchety even then. That had been nearly a century ago, and somehow, the old unicorn just got older and more crotchety, as if he distilled with age. A fine old vinegar, more bitter and stronger with every year.

Most ponies aged like any of the other hooved races, finding a long middle-age, and then descending quickly through a senescence and a brief old-age and then sudden death. If they were lucky, they died surrounded by their grand-children and great-grandchildren. But certain ponies arrived in their belated old-age, and they stuck. They set up residence in the land of the elderly, and grew ancient even by the standards of things that live on. These turtles of the thinking tribes lived on, through eras, through generations. They outlived their children, sometimes their grand-children, and if they were very, very unlucky, their great-grandchildren. It was as if Death had forgotten their addresses, and mis-delivered their eternities to others, to friends and relatives, until they found themselves surrounded not by friends and family, but the respectful descendants of those ponies who had once known them.

Obscured Blade had outlived far too much of his own family, and had never had many friends. With time, his second career as a trainer of Company ponies left him a legacy of respectful former-students, but even those died like may-flies as he just got older and more bitter and stronger with the years that took everything else.

I'm told that he had grown bitter indeed with the last several campaigns, as another crop of students passed away in the face of violent death. The sudden and pointless death of Hidden Jewel last year had hurt him in ways I had barely registered; and although the battles in the south had been relatively kind to the unicorns he had trained, he had still lost four former students and a number of foster-children from the 'old Company' who, if not students, had been 'his' children.

Perhaps this drove whatever madness that drew him and his coterie of Company armsponies into disappearing into the black; all we did know was that they disappeared during the early stages of the sweep against the barrowgasts, and, it turned out, disappeared the better part of a regiment of loyalist militia with them. Obscured Blade had been out hunting barrowgasts, and was supposed to summon the standard-bearer and his magic pig-sticker to deal with anything too big to kill by normal witchy methods. I don't know if the old bokor had found abnormal witchy ways to murder barrowgasts and other big evils, or if he just never found anything and just kept going, or what happened exactly.

Whatever the case was, the III Verdebaie and Obscured Blade's honour-guard had disappeared off the map, and indeed, the 'radio'. Whatever they were up to, the Spirit refused to say. And none of them sent back messages to say what it was they were doing. Our best guess was that they had somehow slipped behind or between the screens of ghoul skirmish-lines the White Rose leadership had shed like lizard-tails upon their back-trail. We found no signs of struggle other than our own, and no dead in the lanes and the fields, nor even risen corpses in III Verdebaie barding among the ghoul opposition. Whatever Obscured Blade had done to hide his self-created task-force, it had passed them through their opposition without bloodshed.

Or perhaps not? We had only encountered those first three barrowgasts, and the mass graves that Gibblets had found should have been enough to create an entire corps of 'gasts. They should have rolled over our regiments like a frozen, icy tide of destruction. Something had spared us that losing battle – perhaps it had been Obscured Blade's task-force, and whatever witchy monstrosity he had concocted?

It was hard to tell, and the wreckage of a destroyed barrowgast wouldn't last long in the humid summer heat of the south.

My witch-aides attempted to find Blade's trail, his path through the dispersed, delaying battle-field that the White Rose's remnant had left behind themselves. Otonashi and the Crow were not successful, and we found ourselves, frustrated, trailing the advancing battalions as they smashed three ambushes in the course of crossing three country miles and the whole of a day. A wasted day, while the enemy continued to gain time and space. We were growing close to the former siege-camps of the White Rose in their investment of Braystown and the Shambles, but the enemy must have already gotten inside those fortified walls.

The supplies left in those well-fortified depots would never have been enough to support the whole of the White Rose's intact army in all of its tens of thousands, but the shattered remnant, increasingly composed of necromancers and their thralls? They could subsist on those thin stocks for a while, at least long enough to fall back once again to a defensive position beside the Housa itself. And at some point, the flotillas of the White Rose were going to try to ascend the river again, and make contact with what remained of their field army.

Nopony wanted to let the leadership of that damnable army get away.

But in the meantime, we, the Company under legitimate command, were stuck behind a stack of undead barricades, killing our way forward slowly, one cross-roads and hedge-row at a time. Blade and his ghost-brigade were off somewhere, slipping through whatever passages his ancient and bitter wickedness had found through the defenses of the White Rose.

He was convinced, I am assured, that the White Rose leadership were secretly liches, the legates under turned coats. He was a bitter and paranoid old goat, and his fantasies of a war fought by the same evil undead on both sides, exchanging coats and glamours as they slipped from one command to the other – this was too much even for a cynic like me. I could not believe that ponies exist in the real world that can operate like this, can play with ponies' lives and beliefs as if they were pushing chess-pieces here and there - Oh, who am I kidding? I can't keep that up. It's totally the sort of thing that liches like the Marklaird and the Walker would have done. There are few things I could not put past the legates, but it was all supposition and guesswork, there was very little evidence to support Obscured Blade's conspiracies.

Not that this sparsity of evidence had been enough to keep that bottle of old vinegar from rushing off into the big empty to hunt the greater undead. I just wished we could catch up to him.

Because the second night of our search for the absent Obscured Blade, something happened on the far side, in the abandoned camps, something truly violent. Great magics – greater than anypony had thought the old bokor had in him – burst in vast detonations of great violence. Flashes of red and greenish-yellow witch-fire were overwhelmed by a wave of darkness which obliterated even dark-sight among the watching Company armsponies, who had been scouting forward and were caught up at the time in destroying yet another nest of ghouls when the fireworks broke out. The desultory night-skirmishing died out as the ghouls fled in mindless self-preserving terror, and the Company skirmishers fell back half-blinded.

Whatever had generated that great wave of darkness, of anti-light, of light-devouring intensity, wracked the Spirit herself in an agony of psychic distress. Something sent great waves of strength and confusion through the medium which was the Mistress, and every Company pony with even a little sensitivity to the Spirit spasmed with the back-draft. We were very lucky to not lose anypony on the front lines, as the chaos in our Spirit was as bad as – no, worse than the incident north of Dover with the Princess-aspect several weeks previous.

The only thing I could compare the experience, was the last time the Spirit had destroyed a lich. The energies, the surges felt like it had when the Walker had been obliterated on the Baneway. The ponies I talked to afterwards, compared it to the moment that Carrot Cake had speared the Marklaird. The one thing that all Company ponies within range compared it to, was this: the death of a lich, and the absorption of its essence into the Company and its Spirit.

Had Obscured Blade found his target? How had he killed the unkillable? The Spirit was not forthcoming, and her Nightmare aspect did nothing but roar mindlessly the rest of that long, strange night.

The few ghouls who tried our lines that night discovered the energies that coursed through the maddened Company – I'm told that they didn't just die upon the skirmishers' lances, but rather exploded like bursting water-gourds. The ponies in question were certainly coated in enough dried gore to support their splattered claims.

By the next morning, we had re-organized enough to find a way to push through the remaining ghouls and into the siege-camps. We found windrows of dead ponies in Verdebaie barding inside the camp proper, showing where they had come over the castral walls and forced the defenses of the White Rose remnant. Obscured Blade was no kind of tactical genius, and his assault had been blundering and bloody. Brigadier Guillaime wept when he saw how badly his regiment had been used.

There were no wounded to be found. What I did find, was the bodies of six Company ponies, scattered here and there within the camp. Fletch Song, unicorn mare, Star Call, unicorn mare, Long Jump, earth pony stallion, Rapier Point, unicorn stallion, Sweet Soil, earth pony mare, and Fine Point, unicorn stallion – all were found dead of battle-wounds, from the forced wall to well into what had to have been the command-tents of the White Rose. All of them 'old Company', former students and foster-children of the bitter old stallion. Found among these Company dead were a great number of corpses in the barding of the enemy, as well as a scattering of more in Verdebaie barding. It had been a brutal, swift battle, without any science or skill.

Obscured Blade had relied on dark-sight, numbers, and aggression to win his battle for him. And it had cost his followers heavily. There were a number of bloodied scorch-pits which might have been further losses, caused by some great warlock's battle-magic, far too much like what I've read of the death-magics of the Maugan mages in Bitter Ambrosia's books. Those scorch-pits may have been the last remains of some additional Company dead, but if they are, I have no information about who or whom they might have been. And the Spirit is not forthcoming on the subject. Again.

The command-tents were a burnt wreckage, shattered beyond recognition. Something terrible had happened there, and my best guess is that this is where Blade killed his lich. The rings of burnt and blasted rubble spread out from that site certainly point to some sort of high-energy magical encounter, and it looked enough like the damage done to the Baneway to confirm the supposition, at least in my mind.

Obscured Blade had found a weapon that could destroy liches. And he had done so. And he was gone again, back into the black. Where he had gone? Only he and his followers knew.

Comments

[Neece]

Natural immortals. Neat. Poor granny, though. She'd hate to outlive her grandchildren... If they are so, that is. She might as well be way older than what we believe

[Dorath]

So Blade is a follower of the We Have Reserves school of "tactical" thinking

If he keeps going like this, he won't have any followers left.

[howard035]

8101296 It's a bit ironic. Blade hates the liches more than anyone. What's their basic strategy? Overwhelm the enemy with superior numbers, more aggressive followers (ghouls in their case), and the powerful personal magic of the leader. Blades is using the legates' own playbook even as he's targeting them.

[howard035]

8105602 The Bride is not a litch by choice, unlike all of her legates. I think she would destroy them all if she could. I suspect Blades is basically right, if not in his action than in some of his suspicions of the legates. I think every last legate would destroy the Bride and take her place if they could, and most have probably started putting such plans into place, because they are the type of villains who see insufficient evil as weakness and think they have a chance. And I think the Bride strongly suspects that, so I don't think she would really mind the death of any legate, even her most useful ones. Her actually useful allies seem to be living mortals anyway, generals and engineers and such.